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Chipping at the Polish

June 4, 2015

At first, the idea of a 24-hour nail salon was nothing more
than a fashionista’s novelty for Sarah Maslin Nir. Who ever heard of an all-night nail salon, Nir—then a freelancer
and now a staff reporter for the New York
Times—wondered to herself over four years ago in the midst of a
treat-yourself birthday pedicure in Manhattan’s Koreatown.

Nir was there in the morning, but her curiosity was piqued.
“I said to the woman doing my toes, ‘Who does the night shift?’” Nir recalled in
conversation with author and fellow journalist Liza Mundy at a recent New
America NYC event at Civic Hall. Her pedicurist replied that she worked both
the day and the night shifts; six days a week, she slept in a barracks above
the salon. “When someone comes for a treatment at night, they shake me awake
and I come down to do the treatment,” the woman explained to Nir. At the end of
the week, she would return to her apartment in Flushing, Queens to sleep for 24
hours before returning to work.

“It still gives me shivers to tell the story,” Nir told Mundy,
who directs New America’s Breadwinning & Caregiving Program. “At that
moment I just thought: this woman is
enslaved.” She went on to describe the genesis of and reporting process for
Unvarnished—a series of articles written
and published
simultaneously in four languages—English, Korean, Spanish, and Chinese—in
early May. The series examines working conditions and health risks faced by
nail salon workers.

Less than a month since its publication, her expose has
prompted New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to institute broad emergency regulations
to protect salon workers and further action is in the works. The story’s impact drew comparisons from Mundy
to other recent examples of powerful, long-form storytelling with a muckraking
bent—such as Jodi Kantor’s piece
revealing the details of “just in time” scheduling at Starbucks (after which
the company changed its practices)—which have had immediate effects on
workplace abuses. With American labor
movements lacking staying power, Mundy wondered, “is journalism all we have now
in terms of exposing these kinds of abuses?”

Nir pitched the story on nail salons to her editor immediately
following her encounter in Koreatown, but it was years later that she got the
resources to report on the industry in an in-depth way. “I didn't set out to
find fraud,” Nir clarified. “I set out to find out what’s up with this
industry…I just knew something didn’t feel right and I wanted to see what it
was.”

What she discovered were manicurists who reported working
for no pay and suffering miscarriages after being forced to work in close
proximity to toxic chemicals like acetone without proper ventilation. Like
immigrant men who get picked up as day laborers, immigrant women were
congregating on street corners in Queens each morning to catch a ride to salons
in the suburbs for work: “those people are imported and warehoused in those
places.”

She went to the street corners every morning with a
translators like Jiha Ham, who is also a veteran reporter for the Korea Times, and gradually got a bead on
the interview subjects who would become the main characters in Unvarnished. “I didn’t say tell me about
your wage theft,” she reflected. “I said tell me about your life.” And they
did. “Everybody wants to be heard,” Nir explained when she talked about how she
convinced her sources to open up to her. “And particularly, it’s a burning
desire in an incredibly voiceless person, a person who has to smile and nod
while they’re living in slums and treated like crap.”

As she interviewed scores of women, Nir tracked her
conversations in a series of Google spreadsheets. One of the striking patterns
that emerged from her reporting methods is what she described as “inadvertent
data journalism.” Much like an earlier New
York Times story that identified
patterns of racial discrimination in slaughterhouse labor practices, Nir found
that consistently, Hispanic salon workers were paid less and did more grunt
work than either Chinese or Korean workers (who, according to Nir, are “at the
top” of the industry).

Mapping the consistency of jaw-dropping exploitation became
a point of narrative strategy between Nir and her editor during the 13-month
process of putting the story together (during which they storyboarded and
revised 11 times before settling on a cast of characters). While gravitating to
the most gruesomely extreme stories was tempting, in the end, “I really wanted
to find the norm, because the norm was bad enough.”

One such story—deemed “too extreme” to believe by her editor
and left out of Unvarnished—involved
a woman who, like a great many Chinese immigrants working in the U.S. for low
wages, had sent her baby back to China to be cared for until reaching school
age. When the child returned, the mother was horrified to discover her child
was suffering from cerebral palsy induced by long-term physical abuse back
home. At times, she felt such despair that she told Nir she wished she could
jump out the window with her child. “It seems so unbelievable,” Nir marveled,
“but that’s the real consequence of exploitation…If you work all the time, if
you make too little money, you cannot be a mother. You cannot be a
father.”

Gender equality is a value—along with “diversity of
viewpoints”—that Nir pursues inside the newsroom as well, where she hosts
meetings of what she calls her Old Girls Club. Founded after reading Tina Fey’s
line in Bossypants about the women in the SNL writers’
room—“the more of us there are the more of us there can be”—the group meets
monthly and adheres to one rule only: no modesty. “Could a man have done my
story? Absolutely. These women would have talked to a man…Many of my
translators were male. The thinking that only X person has access to X subject
is a dangerous thing because the flip side of it is: can a woman be talking to
that man? Can a woman go into that locker room? She can, she does, and she’s
coming for you.”

From labor exploitation to sexism to racism, reporting the
stories in Unvarnished “has made me
rethink so many things,” Nir observed. “When you get a discount service, what
is the cost?” To her mind, cheap luxury is an oxymoron that makes consumers
complicit in the suffering of others. Nir speculated that the deeply personal
response to her stories springs from the status of manicures as “intimate
labor. You hold hands with another person. You interlace fingers and you look
at them across the table. And I think my story revealed that we never truly saw
them.”

Unlike other muckrakers, Nir draws a firm line between
working as a journalist and becoming an activist. “A lot of people ask me what
I want [to be] done next [about the exploitation of nail salon workers] and my answer
is: I’m not an advocate,” she said. “I found a good story. It needed to be told
and I told it.”